I just got a new stack of business cards. Since I’m working in the web industry, they keep flying away from my hands. Web professionals are just eager to get connected, so sometimes they hand over their card while still introducing themselves. Not my really my style, as I like to get an impression of a person, and then see his card. That way I won’t forget the faces by 75 percent of the cards I collect throughout a conference. But hey, that’s just not how it goes in the 2.0 world. So it’s not surprising that services like London-based Retaggr pop up.
Co-founder Ivailo Jordanov mailed me that his service allows people to consolidate their online presence by creating interactive business cards where they can add widgets and links for all their online profiles and data. Whenever a site/ blog owner has made his page Retaggr compatible, a little pop-up shows up with the essential info about the person. Sort of like the Firefox LinkedIN plugin. You can also tag photos, like your Facebook friends do. It looks like this:
This feature totally fits in the whole idea of giving away your card in the wink of an eye, a blog comment is reason enough – so I guess most Web 2.0 people like it.
Jordanov and his team will have to give a lot of business cards themselves these days, as their service lives or dies with the adoption by blogs and sites. He told me that they’ll be announcing some interesting partnerships – like the one they closed with the Italian version of Twitter, BeeMood.com. Only then, Retaggr might become serious competition for services with a similar feature (think Disqus).
Even with a lot of partners it would still be tough to get enough traction. This would work very well on blogs but individual blogs would have to sign up. What keep you (Ernst-Jan) from adding it to TheNextWeb.org?
http://www.retaggr.com/Card/BobBoynton
retagger gives you four options for ‘spreading’ your card. These are my four, but they do not all work equally well everywhere. If this comment will save with them you can see what the comment system will not permit as well as what you can actually add if you like having a card to distribute.
Next: The comment system kept one [the url] and rejected three. If you click on the one kept my card should appear — though it does not popup which would be the best way to do it. The three that were rejected are below.
iframe frameborder=”0″ allowtransparency=”true” width=”360px” height=”300px” src=”http://www.retaggr.com/Embed/BobBoynton”/iframe
script language=’javascript’ src=’http://www.retaggr.com/Script/GetWidget.ashx?t=1&username=BobBoynton’>/script
a href=”http://www.retaggr.com/Card/BobBoynton” rel=”nofollow”>Bob Boynton/a
With any luck I have taken out enough formatting information so that it will see the three as plain text.
Seems a bit like http://www.idlasso.com/
They — retagger and idlasso — are very similar in what they do. I like idlasso better as a name. But I found retagger a bit easier to set up.
Hi all, Ivailo from retaggr here.
Boris, blogs are a part of our strategy, but we are also working on integrating retaggr into other social enabled sites, with BeeMood being our first implementation and a some more to come soon.
Bob, we also have the email signature option, which is quite popular with our users.
and arledia.be real live search, also blekko.com